Many situations arise today where a customer seeking to buy a particular product in a store discovers that the particular store does not have the desired product. However, to make the sale and satisfy the customer, a representative of the store will search an inventory management database of the store operator to determine if another store within a reasonable distance has the desired product in stock. If so, the customer may be willing to travel to the other store to purchase and/or pickup the available product.
In these situations, it is desirable to provide directions from the store where the product is not available to the one that has the product, to make it easy and convenient for the customer to travel from one store to another. For example, the representative may obtain and print directions to the other store, e.g. from an on-line service, and provide them to the customer. In other scenarios, a potential customer may go on-line to research and identify a store having a desired product and then obtain directions to the store for printout, for example, from a retailer's website or from a mapping service website. However, printed directions are not always convenient to use, for example, to read in real time as the customer drives a vehicle herself to the second store.